The 802.11 Standards

Taking off from what you learned in Chapter 1, “Internetworking,” wireless networking has its own 802 standards group—remember, Ethernet's committee is 802.3. Wireless starts with 802.11, and there are various other up-and-coming standard groups as well, like 802.16 and 802.20. And there's no doubt that cellular networks will become huge players in our wireless future. But for now, we're going to concentrate on the 802.11 standards committee and subcommittees.

IEEE 802.11 was the first, original standardized WLAN, operating at 1Mbps and 2Mbps. It runs in the 2.4GHz radio frequency and was ratified in 1997 even though we didn't see many products pop up until around 1999 when 802.11b was introduced. All the committees listed ...

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